Like many of the big name websites, tumblr.com has an interesting story. The history of tumblr.com actually begins before the site itself was launched, with idea contributions from two other web designers.

Developed by web designer David Karp starting in 2006, tumblr was a project that began while Karp was in a two week gap between jobs. Karp had taken an interest in the new “tumbleblogs” for a while and had actually been expecting one of the existing platforms to release their own tumbleblogging site. After waiting for about a year for the new design, Karp decided to do it himself. He worked with developer Marco Arment to achieve the tumbleblogging platform they had been waiting for someone else to develop.

Officially launched in February of 2007, within two weeks the service boasted 75,000 users.

By September of 2010, Arment left tumblr.com to concentrate his efforts on Instapaper, and tumbr continuted to grow. The first big advertising campaign with Adidas launched an official Tumblr blog just two months after tumblr announced the desire to take paid advertising. This greatly propelled the company to the tops of desirable companies.

In 2013, Yahoo and Tumblr.com announced an acquisition for a $1.1 billion purchae price. Even though this news upset Tumblr users (with a petition of 170K signatures), the sale went through just a few months later, and David Karp retained status as CEO.

Since the acqusition of Tumblr.com in June of 2015, the history of tumblr has expanded to huge numbers. There are nearly 100 billion posts in total on the site, with an estimated 81 million posts created every day on the site.

Tumblr.com is a sophisticated site. The dashboard is the main tool for a Tumblr member. This is a live feed that contains recent post from other blogs they follow. The dashboard allows members to upload texts, pictures, videos and link. It is displayed by clicking the dashboard. Users can connect blogs to multiple accounts, such as Twitter and Facebook. Posts update on multiple accounts with one click.

A user can also control the timing of posts using a queue. It delays the timing of posts for hours or days. In addition, they can steer audiences to find their posts on topics by “tagging” pictures. Someone uploads pictures to their blog; then they add the tag #(picture) for people to search for certain topics. The list of topics is endless.

Sophisticated users can control the them of their blog by editing the HTML coding. Each user is able to customize a domain name for their blog, keeping Tumblr anonymous.

The anonymity afforded to users on Tumblr.com has also made it a popular site for porographic content. Only Tumbler knows what ratio of the site is pornographic traffic, but it is estimated at around 5%. The community guidelines require blogs that contain adult content be flagged, and videos are not supposed to be uploaded. Some bloggers use Tumblr to refer traffic to their adult content sites.

The corporate headquarters is located in the Flatiron District in New York City, and also has a second office in Richmond, VA. As of June 2015, Tumblr employed 283 people. Funding comes in the form of investors, as well as a profitable income from advertising. Companies can now also advertise their companies to a larger audience on Tumblr for a fee – some say as much as six figures.

It will be interesting to see where the future of Tumblr will go. Let’s keep an eye on where this corporation is headed.